Nov. 15, 2013

Jello Biafra / Elizabeth Sloan/Handout

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He’s been at the forefront of punk for more than 30 years, first with his band Dead Kennedys and his influential record label Alternative Tentacles, through his political spoken-word tours and work with such artists as DOA and the Melvins, to his albums with his current backing band, the Guantanamo Bay School of Medicine.

He performs an all-ages, full-band show Sunday at The Alley, 906 Victorian Ave. in Sparks, along with opening acts Pins of Light from the Bay Area and local bands Out for War and The Shames.

RGJ: Any memories of Reno back in the day?

Jello Biafra: The first Reno memory actually took place in Sacramento, where we were playing an outdoor show in the parking lot of a record store and it was on the back of a flatbed truck. At one point, the flatbed trailer tipped so all of us slid a few feet one way. But then the trailer righted itself and on we went with the show. And at that show, some kids came up to me and they still had somewhat normal everyday haircuts, and they said ‘Hi, we’re from Reno and we’ve got a band called 7Seconds’ and I took note. And then the original five-piece 7Seconds showed up in San Francisco and played a show. I didn’t get to go … but Tim (Yohanon) and the (Maximumrocknroll music zine) crew were raving about them as a really good band. So at that point, Reno got adopted as part of the greater Bay Area when it was time to put together the “Not So Quiet on the Western Front” album.

RGJ: There are T-shirts around saying “Punk’s not dead, it just sucks now.” What would you say to somebody wearing one?

JB: I totally understand their point but I think there’s a solution. People just have to tap into that inner music fan we all have inside and if you’re fed up with the punk or other music you’re being fed, then go out and take a chance on some other bands or start one yourself and maybe dare yourself to come up with something a little different or at least a lot better crafted and with more fire and soul than the part you think sucks. People have asked me before if punk is dead, and I’ve thought maybe it should be dead for a while in order for it to be reborn. But there’s still bands that will blow me away when they come out and they either break the mold or they’re just such an intense example of something that’s already been done and they’re just such a great band that I’m right there up front in the pit like I always was. The latest examples are Death Hymn Number 9 and Pins of Light that we’re releasing on Alternative Tentacles.

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RGJ: In songs, you call the president Barockstar O’Bummer. What do you say to people who respond that he’s doing the best he can in the face of rabid Republican opposition?

JB: It’s a nice dog-and-pony show but we’re basically a one-party state masquerading as a two-party state. Call ’em what you want: the Republicrats, I call them the Corporate Party. Let’s not forget the fact that the biggest backers of Barockstar in 2008 were the firms on Wall Street led by Goldman Sachs, and he did everything they wanted him to. He didn’t tie any strings to the stimulus that said, ‘Look, you’ve got to cut the bonuses and this is how you’re going to spend it.’ Or you could give the stimulus money to the homeowners who are under water. If that was done, they could get the money on the condition they write a big fat check to the people they owe the mortgage to, and the banks get their money and the people keep their homes. That’s not what the Barockstar administration did. I knew better than to vote for him. I voted Green, and I have no regrets. I’d rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don’t want and get it. And Obama’s voting record in the Senate was not something I could get behind. Every time there was a bill up on what used to be illegal spying or the PATRIOT act or the war on drugs or handouts to Wall Street, Sen. Obama always voted the way Bush and Cheney wanted him to. I guess I didn’t expect him to be a Trojan horse for the most atrocious police state for spying, torture and harassment of whistleblowers we’ve ever had in this country — or that we may have ever had; I wasn’t alive right after World War I but the Palmer Raids were no joke. As far as I’m concerned, people like Manning, Snowden, Assange and Wikileaks, they shouldn’t be risking 35 years in prison or risk being waterboarded by Putin before they kick him out of Russia or Assange stuck in the Ecuadoran embassy for decades. Those people shouldn’t be prosecuted, let alone jailed for 30 years, they should be given a tickertape parade. What Snowden and Manning did were patriotic acts. If you love your country, there’s nothing more patriotic than standing up to your government when it’s obviously wrong. Exposing war crimes and illegal spying shows that they have more courage under their little fingernails than a lot of us will ever show in our whole lives. They all deserve a medal. Why should Chelsea Manning be in jail for 35 years when every last war criminal we sponsor for torture or war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, nothing’s happening, they don’t even have charges filed against them at all?

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RGJ: You’ve got a line in one of your new songs saying “Too big to fail sure don’t mean too rich to jail.” Do you believe a banking executive could ever be jailed?

JB: Dozens and dozens of them were after the savings-and-loan scandal of the late 1980s, which was the same sort of crap and playing casino with other people’s money that happened on a much bigger scale in 2008. Do you know who put almost 200 people in jail that time? The first George Bush, and he was no fan of the common man. He was stinkingly rich and was there to protect his own, but even Bush threw the book at these people. That’s how much more corrupt this country has become since. Imagine how I feel being so damn old I remember how great it was that the law actually triumphed and Richard Nixon was run out of town on a rail for the Watergate crimes. Little did I guess that after a few years, I’d look around and at every level of government, all I would see would be an army of Richard Nixons. ... The extreme and corporate right are hell bent on getting revenge on the ’60s. It’s been this far along and the Supreme Court is wholly corrupt in their favor yet they can’t stop with their obsession to exterminate the ’60s.

RGJ: It reminds me of an interview with Robin Hahnel on the Propagandhi podcast about reform not ultimately being a solution because it takes so long to make progress building each piece and yet they can be repealed in an instant.

JB: That’s why we’ve always got to be on guard. But what are we going to do? Give up? We’ve got to keep fighting the power. I keep fighting the power and encourage other people to do the same, in no small part because it’s more fun to live that way anyway.

RGJ: Do you think the people in your audience are better informed now with the internet than they were in the DK days?

JB: In some ways yes, in some ways no. Even before the digital age, I noticed that while the old Soviet evil empire controlled their populace by depriving them of relevant information, kind of like how North Korea and China do it now, our system is the opposite, where we bombard everyone with so much useless information that people have to be crafty about sifting through all the junk to find something that’s relevant to their own lives and think about it and act on it. After all, critical thinking is actively discouraged in our school system. They don’t want thinkers who will question the system. They want obedient work drones. This is also why bullying is encouraged so much. Sure, there’s all this anti-bullying propaganda in schools now but to me, again, it’s all just for show. The reason boys in particular — and often the more elite, popular-at-all-cost side of women — are encouraged to be bullies is because they’re learning the skill on how to get ahead when they enter the workforce. The worst example of this is Vince Lomardi. You know his quote — winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. By the time I graduated from high school, that was being pushed at us as the way we should live our entire lives. It didn’t matter who we stepped on as long as we got ahead ourselves. That was the whole mantra of the Reaganoids. And that’s the way it’s been ever since: We shouldn’t have any community; we should abolish welfare, Headstart programs or housing; and if people are poor, it’s their own damn fault. And Mitt Romney said they should just borrow money from their parents and that 47 percent of the country are freeloaders. It all goes back to a culture of bullying that’s essential to propping up our kleptocracy. Now our corporate barons have shifted the conversation so far to the right, it doesn’t matter if the tea party ever takes power or not, even semi-reasonable solutions won’t get discussed.

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RGJ: You’re coming back to Reno on Jan. 4 and performing as a special guest with Reverend Horton Heat. What is that about?

JB: The show this weekend is my own band full-on and comin’ at ya. It’s not a retro act. The songs are done the way I like to do them, I do them like I would want to see them done when I go see another band play. … Sure, there’s some Dead Kennedys songs in the set but usually when people hear the new songs, they really like ’em. It’s like a whole new batch of Biafra songs. After all, I wrote most of the music for the DK songs so why should I stop writing cool songs just because it’s not the ’80s anymore. In January, I’m making a cameo appearance with the Reverend Horton Heat where I join the Rev and his band on a few songs. If you know the Reverend Horton Heat and their sound at all, you know it’s going to be very different from the Guantanamo School of Medicine stuff. We will do “John Dillinger,” which is a Guantanamo School of Medicine song that Jimbo Wallace, the Rev upright bass master, plays on. I put an electric bass down below and him up top to color the song, and it came out really cool. We’re gonna play that and we’re gonna play mostly older songs but it won’t be confined to my or Dead Kennedys’ older songs. My musical taste and roots go way way back. … So you’ll hear a different side of my musical personality. I come from far back enough in punk that the Dead Kennedys formed when there weren’t huge piles of other punk albums. You had to go back deeper and deeper into the roots — and into the roots of the roots — to come up with your own thing. The peer pressure then in San Francisco was that no two bands should sound the same. And the last stray copy of some really rare Ronettes or James Brown album was likely to be pulled out of a thrift store bin and show up in the bedroom at some punk rock’s party. We were gleaning from all kinds of things. Stooges were of course the big ones. But there was everything from Velvet Underground to Johnny Cash and — in the case of Dead Kennedys and some of the weirder bands — Captain Beefheart. And why stop there? I still like magic accidents where I go into used vinyl stores and find some weird vinyl LP I’ve never heard of before and take it home and don’t know what to expect and it’s absolutely amazing. I’ve really enjoyed Recycled Records (on South Virginia Street) in the past and really had a good time at Insurrection Records (on Wells Avenue back in the 1990s). In a way it was a struggle to be a house guest of Cimber Weaver, the owner of Insurrection, because we’d stay up all night turning each other on to weird records and there wasn’t much room for sleep.

RGJ: Didn’t he move up to Portland?

JB: Yeah, well, here’s the kicker: I was really really sorry to find out that Cimber has died in the past few days. I guess I’ll dedicate the GSM show on Sunday in his honor. Insurrection was a great store and he was a great dude. It’s a shame to lose somebody so early.

RGJ: I know. I saw a number of shows there where he just pushed back the racks and set up a stage and it was awesome.

JB: Yeah, he just tried to build up the whole scene. It wasn’t making him any money. He was a fan and this was just what he liked to do. I mean you need people like that and now it appears there’s one less of them because of complications from surgery for colon cancer. Please give him my respects in the piece.